Leaving a Legacy
Good evening good citizens of East Coast GRC and Fengshan SMC!
This is your hometown, this is your territory, let us give Singapore a good Bedok roar!
In our walkabouts in Bedok and Simei, I make it a point to greet and shake the hands of young people and children.
Many of them would look surprised, some would say, “but I cannot vote”.
I long to tell them— you are the reason why I am doing this.
I am fighting this good fight so that, not I, but our children can have a better life.
The PAP is campaigning on their track record this election.
They have indeed done a good job in creating a better life for Singaporeans.
I am a beneficiary of the nation building efforts of our founding political leaders.
But something changed in the last twenty years. The PAP today is not the PAP of the early decades.
What our founding political leaders did right was to turn a colonial metropolis into a city that we can all call home.
Singaporeans could afford flats, be secure in their jobs, raise their families without stress, enjoy town facilities for their every day life, identify and be proud of their town.
Then in the 1990s, the PAP introduced privatisation and market forces began to dominate our lives.
Public housing prices shot up with the resale market, healthcare costs shot up, COEs were introduced and shot right up, hawker centres and HDB shophouses were privatised.
We became a GLOBAL CITY with fancy skyscrapers flooded by foreign talents, luxury cars and our costs of living shot through the roof.
Singaporeans are told by our current leaders that it is our fault because we are not hungry enough!
When we gave feedback, our current leaders scolded us for complaining too much and told us to be grateful!
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This is why we have to oppose the 6.9 million population plan.
It is a plan to continue with the global city model and foreign talent focus.
The Workers’ Party wants to revive Singapore as our HOME CITY again.
A home city is where families can afford HDB flats again.
We are calling for the prices of BTO flats in non-mature estates to be delinked from land costs and pegged to the median income of applicants.
Homeowners will only need to pay about 25% of their monthly salary for 20 years to own a home.
We are also calling for the government to revive town centres with hawker centres, coffeshops, HDB shopping plazas and shophouses with low rents and diverse retail mix.
The PAP must understand that these places do not just provide food and services.
These are also places our children grow up with and in.
These are places where our children will fight and make up with their friends, will fall in love and get heartbroken, will spend quality time with us parents.
These are places where our cherished memories of love and life are burned into the concrete.
When we visited Blk 216, Blk 58 and Blk 16 market, we often meet former Bedok residents now living in Tampines, Punggol and elsewhere.
They travel all the way back to have coffee, meet with old friends and relive their memories regularly.
They apologise when we shake their hands saying they can’t vote for the Workers’ Party.
I long to tell them, no, no, thank you. Thank you for continuing to keep these places alive with your chatter, laughter and memories.
We are proud of our global city, but we also want a HOME CITY that is not dominated by the market logic.
We want a HOME CITY that is filled with the human touch and the warmth of the Singaporean spirit.
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The PAP’s population policy is a recipe for overdevelopment.
At every National Day Rally in the last few years, I cringe when the Prime Minister shows us fantastic glossy pictures of future developments.
These are imaginations for a super built-up city packing people densely into a small land area.
In order to keep up with high economic growth, the PAP intends to use up to 10% of the 14% of the total land area kept in reserve today in the next 15 years.
We will end up only with 4% land reserves in 2030.
This means we are not leaving much behind to our children.
Our precious natural and cultural heritage will be sacrificed.
This is the tradeoff — Singaporeans will need to surrender their land reserves and heritage so that the elites can have their shining global city.
I think this is a VERY BAD DEAL!
In their population policy, the PAP proposes to invest and build ahead to accommodate 1.5 million more people, mostly foreigners.
I was frustrated when I read this.
With the introduction of BTO, the PAP refused to build ahead to accommodate tens of thousands of Singaporean couples who were in long queues to buy HDB flats so that they can start a family!
Our low birth rates is partly caused by the longer wait for BTO flats.
Now, instead of empowering Singaporeans to start families, the PAP is trying to solve the problem they have caused in the first place by building ahead to accommodate more immigrants.
You can build ahead for over one million foreigners, but you cannot build ahead for ten thousand of your own people!
Our population policy must focus on Singaporeans, Singaporeans first.
And the reason is simple, we must do this for our children, to leave a sustainable Singapore for them.
I want our children to be able to roam Singapore to discover our history and appreciate our cultural heritage in person.
Not just hang out in shopping malls with air conditioning and bright lights and never see the blue sky.
I want our children to be able to rough it out in our nature parks and the forests, to discover the beauty of our wildlife for themselves.
They should not be caged up in a zoo catering to tourists.
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My fellow Singaporeans, Mr Ng Eng Hen says that the PAP would work with you to find a balance that Singaporeans can live with.
The PAP wants to find a balance.
Yes, indeed, this is what we would do if elected into the Parliament.
We will represent the people and work with the Government to find a BALANCE.
But we will not seek just a BALANCE that Singaporeans CAN LIVE WITH, that you can TAHAN.
We live only once, our life is too short and too special, and should not be barely tolerable.
The population policy BALANCE should not be just whether we can tahan or cannot tahan the foreigners living with us.
Singaporeans need to be empowered to thrive and the foreign workers and talents should empower us to thrive.
But we must leave a real legacy to our children, where our children will remain the majority in our country, continue to be masters of our country and not be treated as lesser talents who are not hungry enough!
My family moved out of our Punggol flat in June and our boy misses our two Indian neighbour families the most, especially the 4 kids he used to run around and play with along the corridor.
We call the corridor our own Sesame Street.
One of the Indian neighbours is what the PAP likes to call foreign talent.
To my family, they are simply Auntie Deepthi and her family.
They opened their home and hearts to us and we opened ours to them.
They have been learning how to be more Singaporean while we learn more about Indian culture.
They even went to the Workers’ Party rally at Punggol East to learn about Singapore politics.
Yesterday, my wife brought my boy to visit and play with the kids again on Sesame Street.
Deepthi cooked poori and chicken curry for my wife to bring back, so that I can eat something after the Aljunied rally.
I was hungry and it was delicious.
When I wore my army uniform to go for NSmen service and walked past their flat, I told myself Deepthi and her family are worth defending too because they have come to love Singapore and Singaporeans.
Our population policy must be geared towards this outcome.
The balance is not one which Singaporeans TAHAN foreigners, and foreigners TAHAN Singaporeans, just so that a small elite can earn millions of dollars and we all hope for some trickle down.
We are a cosmopolitan people and an immigrant nation, and the balance is focusing on Singaporeans first and integrating foreigners who would empower us.
I want my boy and our children to grow up in a Singapore where Singaporeans welcome foreigners into our HOME CITY and our homes because the foreigners respect and love us too.
I want a Singapore where my boy and our children are inspired to aspire, filled with courage to go out into the world as foreign talent themselves and empowered to persevere and realise their dreams.
I want an economy where my boy and our children find dignity and fulfillment in their work, learn from their foreign counterparts and are empowered to strive for global leadership in their fields.
I want a compassionate society where my boy would return home to visit his old but healthy papa, who is not treated as a burden and problem, but as a fountain of wisdom and experience appreciated by the young.
You may say I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one.
Join us in two days’ time, and Singapore can be as one!
Empower you future, vote Workers’ Party!